For the most part, most smartphones these days are pretty secure when it comes preventing access from unauthorized users. This is namely thanks to many smartphone OEMs adopting fingerprint sensors which are obviously impossible to “guess”, at least compared to older security methods like using passcodes.
However it seems that researchers have managed to come up with a way (via Cult of Mac) to fool fingerprint sensors into think it is you, and all they need is a printer (a regular inkjet works just fine) and conductive ink, after which all it takes is a printing of your fingerprint, placing it against your phone’s sensor, and it will unlock as you can see in the video above.
According to the researchers at Michigan State University, “We enrolled the left index finger of one of the authors and used the printed 2D fingerprint of this left index finger to unlock the fingerprint recognition systems in these phones. We tried several fingers of different subjects and all of them can successfully hack these two phones.”
So far they have successfully managed to unlock devices by Samsung and Huawei, although the latter proved to be slightly more resilient. Now the question is, should you be worried? Perhaps, but it should be noted that the hacker will need access to a high-resolution scan of your fingerprint, meaning that you probably won’t have to worry about your run-of-the-mill thief, but at the same time OEMs should probably look into this.